INTRODUCTION
purely hypothetical since neither has the proof of experience. Yet perhaps I may say this much: Mr. Shaw’s play is a classic example of optimism, and my own—a hopeless instance of pessimism.
“Whether I am called an optimist or a pessimist, will make me neither happier nor sadder; yet, ‘to be a pessimist’ implies, it would seem, a silent rebuke from the world for bad behavior. In this comedy I have striven to present something delightful and optimistic. Does the optimist believe that it is bad to live sixty years but good to live three hundred? I merely think that when I proclaim a life of the ordinary span of sixty years as good enough in this world. I am not guilty of criminal pessimism. If we say that, at some future time, there will be no disease, misery, or poverty—that certainly is optimism. If we say that this daily life of ours, full of deprivation and sorrow, is not really so irreconcilable, but has in it something of immense value—is that pessimism? I think not. One turns from bad to higher things: the other searches for something better and higher in ordinary existence. The one looks for paradise—there is not a loftier vision for the human soul—the other strives for recompense in life itself. Is this pessimism?”
In that Europe which is old and wise and patient and exacting, a man does not set to
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